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arranged the sessions so that even top ocials in the church were unaware that Cruise
was receiving services. For ve days in October 1998, Cruise drove into a private
parking lot in the back of the historic Guaranty Building on Hollywood Boulevard, with
the yellow Scientology sign atop it that looms over the fabled district. Charlie Chaplin
and Rudolph Valentino used to have their oces here. Now the lobby is a shrine to the
life and works of L. Ron Hubbard. A giant bust of the founder greets the occasional
visitor. Embedded in the sidewalk in front of the building are the stars of bygone
celebrities on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—Otto Kruger, Tony Martin, Ann Rutherford,
Richard Carlson, Jetta Goudal, Paul Winchell—who had their own moments of great
renown and are now largely forgotten.
Cruise went in a back door that led to a basement hallway. There was an elevator at
the end of the hallway that went directly to the “secret” eleventh oor, where both
Miscavige and Rathbun maintained oces. The World Series was under way—New York
versus San Diego—and Cruise wore his Yankees hat. “He was not in good shape,
spiritually or mentally,” Rathbun observed. “He was personally very enturbulated.”
After that episode of auditing, Cruise went quiet again. He and Kidman were in
England lming Eyes Wide Shut for Stanley Kubrick. In any case, Rathbun and
Miscavige had their hands full, fending o the lawsuits and reporters swirling around
the McPherson case. Rathbun said that, in January 2001, he got a call from Cruise
asking for help. Cruise said that he and Kidman were finished.
Cruise never oered a public explanation for the divorce, and Kidman herself was
clearly surprised by his decision. She later revealed that she had suered a miscarriage
two months after Cruise moved out, and she had asked the doctors to preserve samples
of the fetus’s DNA to prove that Cruise was the father. She pleaded with him to undergo
marriage counseling at the church. Cruise refused, publicly declaring, “Nic knows
exactly why we are getting a divorce.”
This was a decisive moment in Cruise’s relationship with Scientology. Rathbun
provided the star with more than two hundred hours of auditing over the next couple of
years. From July through Thanksgiving, 2001, Rathbun was with Cruise at the Celebrity
Centre frequently, doing auditing rundowns and the PTS/SP (Potential Trouble
Source/Suppressive Persons) course. He paired Cruise with another actor, Jason Beghe,
to do training drills; for instance, Beghe would think of a hypothetical date, which
Cruise had to figure out, using the E-Meter, an exercise Cruise found really frustrating.
A young man named Tommy Davis began acting as Rathbun’s assistant. He brought
sandwiches and helped out with Cruise’s children, making sure they were receiving
church services. Despite his youth, Davis was already a unique gure in the church: He
was a second-generation Scientologist, a Sea Org member, and the scion of the
Hollywood elite. His mother was Anne Archer, a talented and popular actress who had
starred in a number of movies, including Patriot Games and Fatal Attraction, for which she
was nominated for an Academy Award. She had been a deeply committed Scientologist
since she began studying with Milton Katselas at the Beverly Hills Playhouse in her
twenties. She had always been proud to associate herself with Scientology in public,
speaking at innumerable events on behalf of the church. Her son Tommy embodied the